Monday, January 18, 2010

Yes, the 2010 NAMM Show has already come and gone, but as quickly as the time went by, the weekend was a blast. Click through the jump to get the scoop on all the funness.Our first day at NAMM (which was Friday, not to be confused with the first day of the show itself, Thursday) started off with a bit of a debacle in itself. Flight was fine, but unfortunately the hotel didn't get our reservation from the company that takes their online reservations. Luckily enough they had one suite left, and it was pretty cramped but we managed.

The rest of the day went well, saw some of the exhibits, and rubbed elbows with all the other crazy people at NAMM. Dinner that night was in the Doubletree's restaurant Agio, and had the slowest service of anywhere I've been in a really long time. The food was good enough, but nowhere near spectacular enough to merit that ridiculous wait.

Friday's grand finale was Wham Bam Thank You NAMM, an event kicked off by lectures (which we didn't attend) and concluding with a sweet party. Even though it was a super long trek to downtown LA, the music was great and the party was fun. Unfortunately the day ended with just as much of a debacle as it started with: on the return ride the cabbie didn't know how to use his carbon paper credit card swiper, and it took (no exaggeration) 40 minutes to process the card. Makes it that much better to crawl into bed though.

Saturday also went really well, we did some DopplerPad demos at our friends Sonoma Wire Works' booth, more touring of all the booths, and met a lot of people who thought highly of our work, so hopefully we'll have new projects coming out of some of those interactions. Depending on who you are, a particular highlight of NAMM can be the slew of celebs everywhere. Saturday was my day for an 'oh, that person's famous' sighting of Gene Simmons.

That night we went to the most amazing Vietnamese restaurant for dinner and gorged ourselves on course after course of delicious foodstuffs. Our group parted ways after dinner, some to sleep and some to hot tub at the Marriott, and the next morning we checked out of the hotel. We opted not to go to the show on Sunday, and instead went to brunch* and took some time settling into the house we rented for the debacle. Stay tuned, more will be coming soon on the 2010 debacle!

* We went to this place called Chubby's All American Diner across the street from our hotel Saturday and Sunday for brunch. The place is basically Denny's w/ a different theme, maybe a different menu (don't really recommend it, the only reason we were there was for lack of other options), BUT fun fact about Chubs (the (surprise!) super rotund mascot of the restaurant): his skin color changes from light to dark at night. Our waitress didn't know quite why that was, but did mention that this wasn't the first time someone had asked about it.

On a separate note, I find it incredibly fascinating that an "all American" diner's mascot has a physique akin to that of Violet Beaureguarde, considering that a third of the US adult population is outside of a healthy weight range. I wasn't able to find any info on when the restaurant opened, so I'm really curious as to whether this has always been the case or if this is a recent development meant to cater to that particular percentage of the population, i.e. Chubs is their subtle way of saying 'Hey, it's ok to spend a bunch of money at our establishment on food you don't need to eat. Looking like Chubs here makes you "all American." '